Posts Tagged With: geology

“The path pursued by those who have no return is as follows:Fire, light, day-time, the bright fortnight, the six months of the northern solstice; following this path, men who know BRAHMAN go to BRAHMAN.

As contrasted with this path of no-return there is the path of sure-return which is explained in the following:Smoke, night-time, the dark fortnight, also six months of the southern solstice, attaining by these to the Moon, the lunar light, the “YOGI” returns.”

These are words from the Bhagavad Gita, a book on Hinduism. Those who have no return are those who have found Moksha, those who will unite with God (Brahman) Those who return are those who die, who go to heaven, and then return to Earth for yet another life (these are the Yogis). These are the two paths that the soul takes when it leaves the body – according to the Gita.
My mum has been reading the Gita. She stumbled upon these words, and told me to take a look.
And I just felt they were so mysterious….

Whether or not you believe in the afterlife and souls and paranormal activity (which I have to admit I find all quite intriguing), I’ll leave you with a clip on the solstices – it’s scientific, so wary not. I wasn’t quite sure myself what the solstices meant (the last time I studied these was back when I was 15 – and my mind has forgotten everything since, besides meeting Good Charlotte for autographs, and fist-knuckling Bill). So I did some reading. And it’s all quite easy actually. The earth moves around the sun in a plane, the Ecliptic.
But Earth’s rotational axis is tilted at 23.5 degrees. So that means, 6 months in a year, the northern hemisphere will have longer days than the south, and the next months, the southern hemisphere will take over. Solstices happen on the peak of these: The northern solstice when the sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer (a latitude line). The longest day happens in the entire northern hemisphere happens then; and the longest night happens in the Southern hemisphere. And the southern solstice, when the longest day is in the Southern hemisphere (to be more specific, the Tropic of Capricorn); the longest night in the northern.

First day at the Geology Department. The three types of stones in the rock cycle are the igneous stone, sedimentary stone and the metamorphic stone.

The igneous rock happens because liquid magma hardens either above (extrusive rock) or under (intrusive rock) Earth’s surface. Obsidian is simply beautiful by the way!

Sedimentary rock is formed when layers of the sediments from the igneous rock as well as sand from the sea bed is packed under high pressure and temperature. It is compacted in a rock. It is lighter because it has more air spaces compared to the igneous rock, which is heavy and dense.Conglomerates, that’s the one Curiosity discovered on its journey to Mt. Sharp – more evidence to channels of water on Mars. The ones on Mars are essentially a bunch of gravel fused together…and since MOST of the gravel is rounded, that could only mean it’s worn out by water (their too heavy to be transported by wind),like the pebbles we find in rivers.

The metamorphic rock is formed when igneous rocks and sedimentary rocks are submerged underground (where rocks originated from in the fist place as magma) under high pressure and temperature, but it doesn’t melt. I swear we saw a migmatite, a rock at its last stage of metamorphism where it’s so close to melting (it escapes the melt though), though the department labelled it a gneiss. A feature of these metamorphic rocks is “foliation”: the alignment of crystals in the rock in a direction perpendicular to the stress/compressive force applied onto it.